Education reform: How?

by Karoli on June 3, 2010 · 10 comments

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on education reform lately, especially after the Texas School Board Fiasco.

Here’s my problem: All of my kids have gotten great educations in the public school system. They think, they read, they write, and they’re good citizens. Are there things I’d change? Yes. But I don’t necessarily see public schools as the disasters everyone else does.

So talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong with Race to the Top, what’s wrong with schools, why the teachers’ unions are being demonized and why I should support charter schools.

At this point, I really disagree with President Obama on this, and suspect his private education might be clouding reality a bit. So…tell me what I should look at, what you think are good ideas, bad ideas or better ideas.

I’ll read up and write about them from the perspective of a parent, a voter, and a wonk. I promise.

Tagged as: Education, education reform, Politics

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Charles

Have you seen “The Wire”? It really depends where you live. In Seattle (generally thought to be a smart, educated city), 17% of our kids aren't graduating from high school. 54% of our kids aren't graduating with enough credits to enroll in our state colleges. And those numbers vary greatly for kids in distressed socio-economic conditions. We have major gaps in resources and achievement levels between white students and black students, rich students and poor students. Part of the very problem with addressing public education in our country is that people say “MY kids did fine– what's the problem?” The problem is that employers aren't finding people with the skills they need. The problem is that we aren't training home-grown engineers. The problem is that we are falling behind the rest of the world in terms of innovation and production. The problem that “opportunity” is becoming based more on family and class than ever before.

As a former teacher, I can tell you that teachers and schools are being asked to do more and more without having the tools to get it done. All I ever wanted as a teacher was flexibility and accountability and too often in schools we have neither. Teachers are expected to adhere in lockstep to a curriculum, regardless of their students' needs to comprehend the material. If a principal walks into your classroom and you're “off book”, it can be reflected in your evaluation. Charter schools wouldn't be necessary if public schools allowed the kind of flexibility from union structure and bureaucracy that allow charter schools (in some cases) to boldly experiment in success.

Why are teachers' unions being demonized? Because teacher unions tend to be more concerned with protecting the tenure of their senior members than with providing the best possible outcomes for students. Teacher evaluations? Resisted. (Even though any parent or student knows that there are some great teachers and there are teachers who shouldn't be working with kids.) They have railed against reforms, refused to consider performance based compensation, and dragged a 1950s industrial view into a 21st century world. Not all teacher unions act this way, but more do than not.

We need to move toward same-year assessments of student achievement, ensuring that all students are making progress or identifying why they're struggling if they're not and addressing their needs before they get to 10th grade and still can't read. We need to have effective, objective teacher evaluations in place. We will never be able to argue effectively for improved teacher compensation until we can demonstrate that we have the very best teachers in the classroom. We need to change the cultural meme that teaching is a “safe” choice. No. It's a demanding profession, a vocation. It's a career for people who are willing to be bold and take risks.

Race to the Top isn't perfect– there's a lot of skepticism about the reforms they're trumpeting– but it's way better than No Child Left Behind. Until all of our kids are graduating on a more level playing field, in terms of funding and access to opportunity, we have a lot of work to do. All kids.
http://www.drumsnwhistles.com/ Karoli

This is great, thank you. Let me ask a couple of questions. The biggest issues we have here are with class size and language barriers. The standardized testing forces teachers to focus on high test scores which may or may not reflect adequate education. So for me, there's a need for more teachers, but also teachers who are qualified. As you point out, teachers are asked to do more and more with less resources.

What criteria would you use for performance measurement? Are standardized tests worth the constraints on teachers? How do we get those kids reading earlier and with a degree of comprehension. Part of it is the teacher's job and part of it is the parent's job, but in so many cases, parents just aren't there for their kids, particularly in areas with economic challenges. (My kids go to school in a district that ranges from the very, very poor to the very wealthy, all in the same area, so it's an interesting problem here.)
http://twitter.com/k_5remediation Liz Ditz

Oh, oops. It’s Liz in my new alternate professional identity.

Anyway:

1. What Charles said: “We need to vastly improve our teacher training programs”. I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but…there’s a stunning lack of rigor in terms of academic content. I’d put teacher training on a par with chiropractic training (and that’s not a compliment).

2. Like it or not, in California and many other states, we have students incoming at all levels from K up to highschool, who do not speak English and whose families may not have academic language in their first language. So there are two tasks: get those children speaking English fluently, and get them comfortable with academic language. Where are the experts? Globally, who is doing second (or third) oral language acquisition really well? Who is going on to full literacy in the second language?

3. In all states, we have students (mostly but not always) from low-SES families who arrive in kindergarten already way behind classmates, in terms of vocabulary, oral language fluency, and self-regulation. Where’s the research to show what works to get the behind kids up to speed?

4. Charter schools: don’t confuse the vessel (the “charter school” concept) with the content (the charter school’s mission, philosophy, and execution). There are crappy charter schools, just as there are crappy conventional public schools and crappy private religious schools and crappy private independent schools (private schools that have no religious affiliation).

The libertarian mantra is that market forces will drive out crappy schools–but that’s not true in the charter domain and I would make a strong case that it’s not true in the private school domain, either, especially in the religious sector.
Charles

Outcomes based assessments– assessments which are geared toward gauging student comprehension rather than how well they test– and same year assessments– which take a baseline measurement at the beginning of the year, helping a teacher understand where their students are starting from and where their students need help, and then follow up with an end-of-year test that measures learning– are different from high-stakes achievement tests. We don't need to eliminate testing. We need to employ standardized tests that help teachers teach. We need to make sure that we're using EFFECTIVE measurement tools to answer the question we should be asking– which, very simply, is “Are our students learning?”

Having clear learning expectations– “By the end of ____ grade, students should be able to ____, _______, and ______”– give teachers a framework. There is nothing wrong with having those expectations. Much of the 1990s was spent developing those scope and sequence rubrics. Where we have failed is in making that an immutable bar. Rather than interrupting when problems appear, we drive ceaselessly forward, fudging test scores and “teaching to the test”, losing sight of why those benchmarks exist. I'm not arguing for different standards. I'm saying that we need to focus on the early years– implementing universal pre-kindergarten and universal all-day kindergarten. We need to expand Head Start. We need to focus on programs that work hand in hand with families to teach parents what they need to do. It's time and resource intensive– but our society pays the price when we neglect this responsibility. We have an organization in Seattle called Neighborhood House that sends educators out for home visits to work with immigrant families and economically distressed families to teach them how to play with their kids, how to bring learning into the home. Those are the kind of interventions that are needed.

We need to vastly improve our teacher training programs, as well. I was reluctant to become a teacher because of the societal stigma as well as the poor quality of teacher training schools (Blooms taxonomy? Really?). I was fortunate to find an outstanding graduate program (Bank Street Graduate School of Education) where I taught in classrooms during the day and took classes at night, always testing my theoretical understanding against real world challenges. I had a full year of student teaching and another year as an assistant teacher before I had my own classroom. We need to implement mentoring programs for new teachers, guiding them through their first three years in the classroom and encouraging the development of master teachers.

Those are just some of my thoughts : )
http://www.drumsnwhistles.com/ Karoli

These are great, thank you! The outcomes-based testing is something that makes sense to me, too…just like outcomes-based medicine.

I'm hoping some others will come along and share their thoughts, too. I'd love to put all of this together with my own thoughts and write some blog posts. It's certainly better than criticizing everything…constructive suggestions play better.
http://alanwking.wordpress.com Alan King

“DC Youth Speak On The Truth About School Reform” Please read it at http://wp.me/pC3Xj-gr
http://www.jesseluna.com jesseluna

There are a lot of great public schools out there. Then there are those that are just holding on at the seams. I taught elementary and middle school for 7 years. For K-12, the biggest success factor is the combination of learning environment, parent participation, and community support. Charter schools are usually good at understanding this “trifecta.” KIPP schools, in particular, seem to have found a winning formula.

Public schools suffer when their best students head off to charter schools because they are very dependent on being ranked via standardized tests. Focusing only on tests scores and only on grades is a failing system. It's an early 20th century structure (like the production line), not a 21st century one.
http://www.drumsnwhistles.com/ Karoli

Liz,

You get to be my 1000th Disqus comment! Congratulations.

The consensus thus far seems to be: a) train teachers better; b)mentor young teachers better; c) charter schools are a drain on public schools and d) charter schools are hit and miss (I agree. They are.).

This is all really thought-provoking. I am rolling it around to put together a blog post summing it up.
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